what do you think about this?

Originally Posted by Kpt. Munson

This reminds of the foolish act of impatience on my part and will keep it short and sweet; In the dead of night, I torpedoed a Hunt and thru the periscope, I could see it in flames but it was still moving faster and away from me. When it reached 1700m, I had a sudden rush of blood to the head and surfaced the boat to finish off the Hunt with the Deck Gun. Bad move.. the Officer, my recently awarded Knights Cross holding Gunner and 2 aids got wiped out before we got a shell off plus damage to the Sub. Needless to say, I don't do anything like that now.

Heh . . . quite the shocker, I'm sure.

I usually do not target destroyers or escorts, instead working to strangle the enemy's war efforts by sinking his merchants.

However, now and then I do wind up potting one. Usually that's a result of having one pass by within 400 meters and abruptly start pinging me. --grumbles--

In this instance it happened to be a Hunt destroyer. It was early '41, and I'd been creeping in at an angle, to slide just behind him then past on my way to a nice juicy convoy. Over 15 minutes I'd been watching the escorts approach, timing their back-and-forth sweeps. For whatever reason (Bernard, perhaps? ) I'd just started creeping my way past when, at 450 or so meters, the destroyer abruptly went to flank speed, turned my way and started pinging.

I'd already pre-set tube 1 in case of that contingency: a steamer set at 4.5 meters, magnetic pistolled and highest speed. The world's quickest range, bearing, AoB and speed check, and LOS!

Seconds later (and in the immortal words of Mr. Marvin Martian) there was an earth-shattering kaboom!

I watched the destroyer drunkenly reel past, fully aflame amidships, then dropped the scope, pushed my speed up to ahead standard (heck, it wasn't as if they didn't know I was out there now!) and continued on my way towards the convoy, reloading the tube as I went.

About 5 minutes later I went back to ahead slow and popped the scope up. I glanced behind me, and the destroyer was still reeling, heeling to the side and heaving to in a circle about a klick behind me, still merrily blazing away.

Turning my attention then to the convoy I started making finicky refinements to my course and speed, looking over the ships and selecting which ones were ripe for the picking. Now and then I'd ask my sonarman for the nearest warship, getting back in reply the closest was still at least long range.

A few minutes later, and I started to frown. Was that high-speed screws I was hearing? Nooooo. Impossible!

Heh.

I turned the scope around 180 (speaking of which, even using the control key it still seems to take forever to pivot the 'scope around. is it just my system that it's slow?) and yelped.

Remember "Jurassic Park?" The movie? The scene where the Tyrannosaur is chasing the Jeep, and the guy looks in the side mirror, where the legend says 'object in mirror are closer than they appear', and just sees this big ol' toothy maw slavering at him?

At 1.5 mag, all I saw was bow, with a big old bone in its teeth. That destroyer that I'd torpedoed, set aflame and lamed, turned out to be not all that lame after all. In fact, they seemed pretty determined to take some German U-boat butt along with them to the bottom.

How I managed not to get terminally damaged from the ashcans, or managed to get missed by ramming, I've no idea. It certainly wasn't (much as I'd like to claim otherwise) due to my magnificient Skippering skills, that much I'm certain of.

In closing, I guess what I've learned is that the only safe destroyer is one already on the bottom . . . wayyyyyyy down below.

[mookiemookie]

I don't target DDs with the deck gun. That's like suicide in my book. As someone already said, one well placed shot from their guns and your diving capabilities are shot all to hell (literally!). Not a position I want to put myself in.

I don't even target them with torpedos either, unless its one of those "stern shot, perfect 180 degree bearing, 500m away" deals.

[Tachyon]

If you're really lucky or with some clever manoeuvering , you can actually make another DD shoot the DD chasing you by "Accident" . Happened to me on 3 occasions, and all the DDs were sunk